Saying farewell to February always feels simultaneously momentous and premature. February is winter's last best chance at making its fingers felt in the world, but March is a month fraught with uncertainty, where winter and spring vie for supremacy. Maybe it's fitting, then, that the theme for March will be "trust." March is a month of few certainties, and when the world is chaotic sometimes there is nothing left to do but trust. It's terrifying and weird and beautiful all at once--to trust is to surrender to the uncertainty that surrounds us.
When I was younger, one of the phrases that always stuck with me was "the people in these songs should have names." I found myself thinking about that this month, and I realized that, though I know the names of all of these people who are telling stories, you do not. I imagined that maybe it would be an interesting endeavor to work out who was telling which story, but I think I was mistaken in this. So from now on I will give them names. Or rather, I will reveal their names--they've had these names since long before I started writing this. Furthermore, I've given them names in the stories I've already published--perhaps you should go back and reacquaint yourself with them?
It is my hope that these stories will build as the year wears--there will be new context and new perspectives, and it's only four months until we start reaching counterpoints. Four months! It seems so far from now, but also so very close. Time seldom follows the rules we tell it to, and it never really fits in the stories we give it.
2 comments:
I'm bound to always be dissatisfied it seems. No matter the season or month, I always feel like it's changing for the worse.
That thing about the names threw me off a bit at first, but it's an interesting twist. It radically changes the feel of the previous stories...but in a subtle way, if that makes sense. I mean, they have a name, but they still don't exactly have a face. Then again, I don't know how it will evolve. Anyway, it's nice to see things shaping up!
Also, your "About". Actually it's what got me hooked so to speak and the reason why I decided to try to read some of your stories, because it spoke to me. Especially the second paragraph. Let me unleash my unwarranted verbosity.
I'm a lucid dreamer - not all of my dreams are lucid, but a good portion of them are. But in some rare cases, my brain gets stuck in an in-between state where I'm aware of both "worlds", but it's not sure what is real and what isn't. In one of them I was dreaming that I was with people I knew, in a lively gathering. I was speaking with them, but suddenly, for some reason, I became aware of the 'real' world, and what's more, I was actually speaking out loud (I've been a big sleep-talker since I was a kid). I knew that I was speaking out loud, lying on my bed with my eyes closed, while speaking with people at the same time, in another place, but I didn't know for sure which world to believe in. What I knew though was that I'd probably look stupid on my bed (we where discussing perfectly trivial things, everyday life etc.), but I'd look even more stupid if I stopped talking to those people, and crazy. So I kept talking just in case, it seemed to be the least damaging behavior.
At some point I understood I was on my bed. I indeed felt very stupid :( And now you probably think I'm crazy. And the thing is, you'd be perfectly right! :D
But yeah, nice About. I love dreams. My favorite Lovecraft story was Polaris. You should try to get your hands on it if you haven't already.
For a while now my fixation has been on the brain and human perception and the fundamentally squishy nature of reality. It's fascinating how little we know about it.
There's apparently some skeptics out there that don't believe that lucid dreaming is actually a thing. I think it's because it's hard to talk about this strange realm of consciousness without sounding a little mystical about it, and people who call themselves skeptics are very fond of ignoring anything that doesn't sound sciencey enough for their tastes.
Some people of course don't properly understand why the problem of human perception is so important to me. I'll talk to them about it and they basically say it's a known bug and then brush it aside like it doesn't really matter, or like it can be worked around without too much difficulty. But the actual point is it's not a bug at all. It's actually a beautiful thing if you let it be. There's a whole world out there waiting to be explored if we just let go of the idea that we have to be right in order to live.
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